Orwell’s Reflections on the Spanish War[0] has a good quote about this which feels particularly salient in light of the tariffs:
> Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.
I once thought this, but it is dangerously incorrect. During the pandemic I observed people up-close deny reality in front of their own eyes. I sat at a dinner table and listened to a man go on about how the hospitals were just making up Covid cases for money, and it wasn't really that widespread - right after his wife related that the Covid ward at the hospital she just got back from was nearly full. Where she worked, as a doctor.
Or consider a century earlier, in world war one we poured humans into literal meat grinders with the belief that maybe today, if we just poured enough in, it would make a difference. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary for days, weeks, and months prior. One need not read much history to see that people will care about a story they have accepted long past the point their senses tell them otherwise. They will claim they are freezing while the flames lick their very feet.
It's possible that hospitals were claiming something like a car crash victim with COVID as a COVID death for extra funding, making actual total deaths less due to COVID than reported, meaning what he said was true, even while the hospital is full of people with COVID, possibly including that very car crash victim.
Other official facts of the time period included 1. standing in a restaurant without a mask on is almost terrorism and 2. sitting at a restaurant without a mask on is fine.
Numbers of cases, deaths, and how those numbers are tabulated are factual data. We can argue over the data quality, but at this point we have data from many independent countries' health services. Our view of these facts has gotten better with time, and we now have more certainty than we did in the early days of the pandemic.
Recommendations, regulations, and responses to the pandemic as it happened are factual in the sense that they happened, but are not "facts" in the same way. It is not a fact that standing in a restaurant without a mask was terrorism and sitting was fine. Instead, given the information available at the time, and the practical requirement to have your mask off to eat, this policy was chosen for a time as a risk mitigation balanced with practical requirements. The appropriateness of this policy is a matter of opinion.
